"And second, where we have concerns, we will conduct interviews, make requests for information (RFI) - which ask a series of detailed questions about the app and the data it has access to - and perform audits that may include on-site inspections", Ime Archibong, Vice President of Product Partnerships at Facebook, said in a blog post. The disclosures over Cambridge Analytica have incited examinations on the two sides of the Atlantic and drove Facebook to fix its strategies on how individual information is shared and gotten to.

"To date, thousands of apps have been investigated and around 200 have been suspended - pending a thorough investigation into whether they did in fact misuse any data", the executive noted. A Cambridge Analytica spokesperson said the company used Twitter for political advertising but insisted that it had never "undertaken a project with GSR focusing on Twitter data and Cambridge Analytica has never received Twitter data from GSR".

About 40 per cent of the people who took the tests also opted to share Facebook profile data, resulting in a large database, the University of Cambridge psychometrics centre said of the project on its website.

Outside of that key 200 figure, Facebook's revelations leave a lot of important details out. Were these 200 apps chosen simply because they requested or acquired user data, or because Facebook already has evidence or suspicion that they held onto and sold the data? However, this is yet another reminder that when you agree to sharing your data with one app, it is going to be mass circulated, ending up online. What will the final count be?

In 2016, Facebook believed CA when it said that it had deleted the data it had stored, only to find out the truth in 2018 after a whistleblower came forward.

The document revealed that political consultancy AggregateIQ spent around 1.6 million USA dollars (£1.2 million) on adverts from the Vote Leave Facebook page during the 2016 European Union referendum campaign, as well as 329,000 dollars (£242,000) for BeLeave, 51,500 dollars (£37,900) for Veterans for Britain and 32,700 dollars (£24,100) for the DUP Vote to Leave.

"Cambridge Analytica may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules", the spokesperson added.